In Parts I and II of this series* we saw that from 2000 to 2002, key members of the Harvard Medical School “CAM” program, including the Director, had promoted quackery to the legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We also saw other explicit or tacit promotions by Harvard institutions and professors, and embarrassing examples of such promotions on InteliHealth, a consumer health website ostensibly committed to “providing credible information from the most trusted sources, including Harvard Medical School….”

Those points were made in an essay that I sent in the spring of 2002 to Daniel Federman, the Senior Dean for Alumni Relations and Clinical Teaching at Harvard Medical School (HMS). I also sent Dr. Federman a treatise on homeopathy, including several examples of credulous Harvard professors and misrepresentations aimed at students, patients, and the public. Much of the content of that treatise has been covered by the series on homeopathy† with which I began my stint here on SBM, so here I’ll post only the parts relevant to promotions by academic physicians, including those at Harvard. There is a bit of redundancy involving InteliHealth, but please bear with me if you’ve made it this far; the discussion will be meatier than the short summary in Part II.

As hard as it is to believe, 2009 started out very promising from the perspective of actually countering the misinformation of the antivaccine movement. Antivaccine hero Andrew Wakefield, who with the help of the credulous and sensationalistic media started the entire MMR-autism scare in the U.K. a decade ago, was revealed as not just having been in the pocket of trial lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers and having been an incompetent scientist but as a scientific fraud, thanks to the investigative tenacity of Brian Deer. Thanks to Wakfield, the measles, once declared conquered in the U.K. in the mid-1990s, has come roaring back to the point where it has been declared endemic again by the ealth Protection Agency (HPA), the public health body of England and Wales. This was rapidly followed by the rejection by the Special Masters of the Vaccine Court of the claims of all the test cases in the Autism Omnibus case. It was a one-two body blow to the antivaccine movement.

Unfortunately, the antivaccine movement is nothing if not resilient. After all, the science has consistently been against each of its favorite claims, namely that the mercury in the thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines or that the MMR vaccine causes autism. They simply move the goalposts and pivoted effortlessly to much harder to falsify ideas, such as blaming “toxins” in vaccines or proclaiming that our current vaccine schedule is “too many too soon.” After scientific setback after scientific setback that have revealed the antivaccine movement to be nothing more than the 2009 equivalent of creationists or the flat Earth movement, why would it matter to them that Andrew Wakefield has been thoroughly discredited and their signature legal action, the Autism Omnibus, has gone donw in flames? It doesn’t. Certainly it didn’t stop David Kirby from duping Keith Olbermann into chastising Brian Deer for nonexistent conflicts of interest; a group proclaiming loudly “We Support Dr. Andrew Wakefield” with a petition; David Kirby, Generation Rescue, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. from trying to distract attention from the defeat of the antivaccine movement in the Autism Omnibus ruling; or Andrew Wakefield himself from “complaining” to a press board about Brian Deer’s alleged misbehavior and errors. After all, science doesn’t matter to the antivaccine movement.(more…)